Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday January 25, 2006 @09:43PM
from the I-love-the-smell-of-alternative-fuel-in-the-morning dept.

n0xin writes "According to Fortune, "The next five years could see ethanol go from a mere sliver of the fuel pie to a major energy solution in a world where the cost of relying on a finite supply of oil is way too high." In an effort to meet fuel-economy standards, automakers already have 5 million ethanol-ready vehicles on the road. Supporters are optomistic that "we can introduce enough ethanol in the U.S. to replace the majority of our petroleum use in cars and light trucks." Are SUVs included in this category?"

We'll just turn all of south america and africa into big ethanol farms, the people living there be damned. Who cares if it takes an absurd amount of our infrastructure for the renewables, as long as it's "environmentally friendly"?

The answer to the question is no, because this is just a half-way measure at best, even given a lack of morality with regard to the people in foreign. As you pointed out, we can turn the Third World into our ethanol-farming slaves (but it's not ACTUALLY going to be very environmentally friendly), and we'll have to start getting bananas, coffee, cocaine, and other important crops somewhere else.The great thing about ethanol, if it replaced oil, is that we would no longer have to support evil dictatorships l

One thing to remember is that african and south american nations desperately want open agriculture markets, and crop-generated ethonal is one way undo the European, American and other developed nation's tarriff and exchange barriers. It's not like we're forcing them into farming (you might argue that American agricultural subsidies are forcing them OUT of farming). Farmers in 3rd world countries are no more slaves to farms than the American white collar class slaves to the office.Reguarding dictatorships, I

If the question isn't energy generation (ethanol is fermented grain, which derives energy from sunlight), then it is just about energy storage... what form can it be in that's close to being as convenient as oil/gas/petrol.

Hydrogen has its flaws here. I'm thinking we need to move away from such a dependence on portable stored energy. More light rail, less cars. Even so, can't eliminate it completely, so we probably need something revolutionary in solid state energy storage. Just no clue what it could be.

Historically it has been. Historically, the USA was an oil exporter too; that changed when US production peaked in 1970, while consumption continued to rise. Now oil production of the entire world is peaking or about to.

Historically, most people farmed for a living. If the future was going to be just like history, we wouldn't have history as we know it. Eras end. The era of cheap oil is ending.

Ethanol would take up too much of our ag land that we need to sustain our food supply. Check the movie The End of Suburbia (http://endofsuburbia.com/ [endofsuburbia.com] for a preview of our sad future.

In that case why does the EU pay farmers to set aside their fields rather than grow things that contribute to the surplus? Why is surplus food routed to Africa (lowering the price for whatever domestic produced grain there is)?

Perhaps there just needs to be a change in focus, especially if you can ferment the non edible parts of food crops for fuel (such as the stalks on grain crops) and waste vegetable matter it could be a win win.

Shipping food to Africa and the third world is a form of economic warfare. It deflates the price of grain and food products in the places where it is shipped, and thus discourages the people in those countries from growing more of their own food. It creates an economic dependence in said countries for regular shipments from the 'benevolent' countries who contribute the food.Would *you* want to plant a crop of corn if it were likely that people from another country were going to dump their surplus crop int

Actually, producing ethanol does not take up our agricultural land. Ethanol that is currently produced in the corn belt is produced from the waste of farming operations. The ears of corn are harvested and sold to the usual buyers. The stalks that are normally made into feed for livestock are first sent to an ethanol plant where the sugars are extracted and made into alcohol through fermentation. After the sugars are extracted the stalks are made into feed for livestock as they would have before. The pr

Most corn based ethanol produced now is produced from corn, and not field trash. The corn is reduced to a "distillers grain" in the process which is a higher protein animal feed than the corn from which it is derived.

Production of ethanol does not take up more land. The land is already producing corn. What the production of ethanol does is to make use of the corn closer to where it is produced and to convert it into a form (a liquid) that is easier to transport and use.

That's not what I've read. EtOH isn't produced from waste because of pitfully low yeilds, kernal is used because it has a high card (fermantable) content. The waste is waste because its mostly fiber, not good for eats or anything else.

The stalks aren't made in to feed, the seed is, again for the same reason - low carb content. And I really hope you mean the cob and not the stalk, because if you've ever driven by a corn field you can clearly see that they don't even bother to pull up the stalk.

The production of EtOH has been increasing, but the appropriate question to ask is would it be cheeper than gas if the EtOH subsidies were removed. It wouldn't have two years ago, but we may be getting close to the point where it is now.

However, if a farmer is going to sell a portion of his crop to EtOH production, that is all it would be used for.

It looks like there's finally a use for all the grass clippings coming out of suburban neighborhoods and non-office paper that gets thrown away instead of being recycled.

From the article:Instead of coming exclusively from corn or sugar cane as it has up to now, thanks to biotech breakthroughs, the fuel can be made out of everything from prairie switchgrass and wood chips to corn husks and other agricultural waste.

Here is a very detailed report [westbioenergy.org] on cellulosic ethanol. In terms of efficiency, it has nothing on biodiesel and is less efficient than methanol. But there is already a market, and little in the way of regulatory hurdles.

Instead of coming exclusively from corn or sugar cane as it has up to now, thanks to biotech breakthroughs, the fuel can be made out of everything from prairie switchgrass and wood chips to corn husks and other agricultural waste. This biomass-derived fuel is known as cellulosic ethanol.

We can't remember how many times we've been asked the question: "But doesn't ethanol require more energy to produce than it contains?" The simple answer is no-most scientific studies, especially those in recent years reflecting modern techniques, do not support this concern. These studies have shown that ethanol has a higher energy content than the fossil energy used in its production. Some studies that contend that ethanol is a net energy loser include (incorrectly) the energy of the sun used to grow a feedstock in ethanol's energy balance, which misses the fundamental point that the sun's energy is free. Furthermore, because crops like switchgrass are perennials, they are not replanted and cultivated every year, avoiding farm-equipment energy. Indeed, if polycultured to imitate the prairies where they grow naturally, they should require no fertilizer, irrigation, or pesticides either. So, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, for every one unit of energy available at the fuel pump, 1.23 units of fossil energy are used to produce gasoline, 0.74 of fossil energy are used to produce corn-based ethanol, and only 0.2 units of fossil energy are used to produce cellulosic ethanol.

Between its lesser environmemtal impact (up to 80% reduced emmisions) and its cost-efficiency, cellulosic ethanol is far more environment-friendly than fosil fuels.

Well, I didn't know. I guess I should have RTFA. However, I have hard time believing that culture like switchgrass would not require fertilizer. Prairies don't require fertilizers because grass dies and decay right there and animals eating it defecate and die and decay right there, thus keeping the eco-system intact. However, take that prairie, cut all the grass, produce ethanol and burn it. Do it for a couple of years, and without fertilizers, you shouldn't have any more grass growing there.Of course, I'm

Oh great, thus we can all tell the farmers to stop putting fertilizers on their fields, and tell all organic farmers to stop putting the excrements of their animals on their fields, because it's useless: most nutrients come from the rain.

Anyway, I give up. I don't want to say that the article is wrong because I don't have the knowledge to say so. Maybe that the kind of culture they are speaking of would only need nutrients that come from the rain to be a sustainable culture, but I'm skeptic.

Growing corn takes a lot of pesticide/machinery/etc.. Ethanol is NOT environment-friendly

Ethanol makes sense if it's a byproduct of something else or produced by a less intensive farming method - Brazil is using it successfully but they can't make enough for everyone without using a lot of oil to make fertilizer and defeating the purpose. Methanol makes more sense from some plant material. Methane makes a lot more sense from waste products.

Where ethanol has the advantage is that conventional car engines can run well on it without much work and it's easier to ship around. Methane can run in diesel engines without much work - but due to the high sulphur content of US oil there aren't a lot of diesel vehicles currently in the USA and as a gas it makes more sense in fixed installations than vehicles. Biodiesel makes sense so long as it's made out of waste products - specificly growing Canola for it is burning oil to make fertilizer to make biodiesel and is a losing prospect.

There's no one true energy - even for vehicles. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something or has swallowed a sales pitch.

I can understand the simplistic misconception, but what you are describing is "organicly grown" corn and is a lot more expensive and difficult than using artificial fertilizers - plus there are obviously a lot of losses in the system.

Ethanol would be a lot cheaper than trying to deploy hydrogen. With the hydrogen route, we have to redeploy our entire fuel infrastructure. Which isn't going to happen as long as most people drive gasoline cars. Ethanol, OTOH, can work in a standard gasoline engine with a few modifications, and can be supplied from the existing fueling stations.

With gas prices being so high, all that's standing in the way of Ethanol is this constant argument over whether or not it's energy positive or not. Of course, this completely ignores the issue that hydrogen isn't energy positive either. You need powerplants upstream to crack hydrogen, just as you'll need upstream energy to supply farming equipment. Even in Ethanol isn't energy positive (which I don't believe for a minute), it's still a better option than hydrogen.

What we really need for Ethanol to take off is a proper hybrid vehicle [blogspot.com] capable of burning both gasoline, ethanol, and various blends.

What we really need for Ethanol to take off is a proper hybrid vehicle capable of burning both gasoline, ethanol, and various blends.

These are all over the place here in Brazil. Last I heard, something like 80% or 90% of small cars were sold with hybrid ethanol-gasoline engines (nicknamed Flex around here). Many shops (even small ones) already have the technology to convert an ordinary gasoline engine to a hybrid, and it isn't that expensive either.

I should remark that Brazil was a pioneer in the usage of ethanol for car fuels, but in the last decade or so it was getting out of fashion. With the advent of hybrid engines we're seeing a revival of sorts, particularly given the lower price (which unfortunately has been rising though).

Regardless of what crop is used to produce it, ethanol requires areable land, and lots of it.

To produce enough ethanol to sustain the US alone, would require hudreds of thousands of acres of crops. Regardless of the sustainability of the crops, it is a huge management issue in and of itself to control all that production.

Hydrogen, on the other hand, can be produced readily in a power-plant type fashion.

To produce enough ethanol to sustain the US alone, would require hudreds of thousands of acres of crops.

Dude, do you have any idea at all of the number of acres of crops in the USA?

Hydrogen, on the other hand, can be produced readily in a power-plant type fashion.

Other than in science fiction, where do you have a hydrogen power plant? A hydrogen-powered car? Ethanol has been a *practical* reality for decades. My first car powered by 96% ethanol was a Brazilian 1983 Chevette. At that time, about 90% of all new cars being made in Brazil were powered by ethanol.

For the last 28 years, every single fuel station in Brazil has had ethanol pumps. Have you ever seen a hydrogen pump in any fuel station anywhere in the world? Apart from straight ethanol, all the gasoline in Brazil contains at least 20% ethanol.

There has never been a single hydrogen powered car sold commercially anywhere in the world. In Brazil, tens of millions of 92% ethanol powered cars have been sold in the last 30 years, and many more cars powered by 20% ethanol.

I believe, ethanol, can be, at best a transitional fuel, what with the human population increasing, the future will have less land available for such uses as a fuel crop.

I heard of hydrogen cars (non-production) in the '60s already. If fusion ever comes online, 0% land is needed, and there would be plenty of energy for electrolysis, or perhaps the more efficient steam electrolysis. Even if fusion doesn't pan out, solar energy could be harnessed for that purpose (I'm not talking about purely solar photaic cells, but a hybrid system of a parabolic dish design.) Afterall, collectively, millions of acres of roofs are being unused everyday!

The real question is: is there hydrogen in the pumps anywhere you know? If you buy this BMW you mentioned, where will you fuel it? Down here, there is ethanol in the pumps in 100% of the gas stations over a country that is larger than continental USofA, meaning you can travel the equivalent of the Route 66 and never get without fuel. Got it?

with the human population increasing, the future will have less land available for such uses as a fuel crop.

Wrong. Natality decreases faster than mortality, so that the trend is population stabilisation. Absent major cultural shifts, we would see even a decrease. Japan has already started to shrink, and Europe won't be long.

It runs up to 85% Ethanol. Which sucks. And blending the fuel types on your own can result in unexpected timing problems. Using a Stirling, OTOH, allows you to burn any mixture of fuel without concern for timing issues. In fact, such an engine could burn just about any fuel, including hydrogen.

Actually, there are much bigger things standing in the way of "everyday ethanol". They are:a) a massive 10's of Billions of dollars of Fossil Fuel investment (dating back to the 60's) - You'll have to do your own homework but the keywords here are: President Regan, GH Bush (Cia Director), Noriega, Iran, Panama, Bush (41), Iran, Iraq, Bush (43), Saudi Arabia, Sept. 11th, Fox News, Iran, War on Christmas, Iran, Iran.b) Hydrogen is the future, but no new energy can come about without the approval of item a)

Of course, oil isn't energy positive either.
Okay, sure it's energy positive from the time we extract it from the ground, but any fair consideration needs to take into account the amount of energy that, once upon a time, was required to create that oil, since essentially what we're required to do is replace the whole supply chain (or, wait a few hundred thousand years -- or more! -- for the supply chain to replenish the stocks we've taken).

I'm led to believe that the figure is approximately 24 tonnes of [eurekalert.org]

I know from experience that Europeans love Diesel motors, but I know (also from experience) that they are heavy, noisy, emit dirty byproducts, etc... While the burning of ethanol generates water and carbon dioxide. Besides, we in Brasil have a 25-years ongoing experience with ethanol-powered cars -- commercially available, and 96-grade ethanol available in the pumps of every gas station in the country.

Gas is not expensive. It has dropped in price versus inflation, leading me to believe we're not running out.

They're currently being held artificially low by the government oil reserves. The price per barrel of sweet crude oil hasn't budged much from its ~$60 position. Ethanol is extremely competitve at that price, and has been blended in many areas to help keep gasoline prices down.

Ethanol is much more expensive in the long run -- compare mileage for the same amount.

All the biologists and physicists I've spoken to say no. It's a fuel source, yes, but not a viable replacement for oil. It has a much lower fuel efficency, and it is still non-renewable. It might solve SOME of the pollution problems, but that's still a "might". It won't solve the growing energy need, and it won't solve the issue of non-renewability.

We can't remember how many times we've been asked the question: "But doesn't ethanol require more energy to produce than it contains?" The simple answer is no-most scientific studies, especially those in recent years reflecting modern techniques, do not support this concern. These studies have shown that ethanol has a higher energy content than the fossil energy used in its production. Some studies that contend that ethanol is a net energy loser include (incorrectly) the energy of the sun used to grow a feedstock in ethanol's energy balance, which misses the fundamental point that the sun's energy is free. Furthermore, because crops like switchgrass are perennials, they are not replanted and cultivated every year, avoiding farm-equipment energy. Indeed, if polycultured to imitate the prairies where they grow naturally, they should require no fertilizer, irrigation, or pesticides either. So, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, for every one unit of energy available at the fuel pump, 1.23 units of fossil energy are used to produce gasoline, 0.74 of fossil energy are used to produce corn-based ethanol, and only 0.2 units of fossil energy are used to produce cellulosic ethanol.

I dug up some articles through google the last time ethanol was mentioned and basically, they said that:

Cars can handle 10% ethanol with no modifications

20% ethanol eats away at various gaskets and other plasticy/rubbery parts.

So you can run your car on a 40% ethanol blend, but I wouldn't expect it to last a long time. And maybe you should keep one of those ABC fire extinguishers [survivalinstinct.com] in your car... just in case one of the gaskets give up & your engine catches on fire.

I am looking forward the day when every wheel in the car will have its own size, when there will be 234 different types of DVD, of course mutually incompatible, and i could finally write my/. posts in southeastern italian dialect !!!

The article says that attitude is the major barrier, but I still think it's cost right now. This page [cockeyed.com] is obviously out of date (although the girl is still cute!), but I think it still makes the point that gasoline is still a pretty cheap liquid by comparison. Oil is around $1.20 per gallon right now. I'd be lucky if I could find a cup of coffee for that price! Ethanol is still expensive and will be until the demand is high enough to start using it. Sure, mass-production plants have yet to be built... but those things aren't cheap, either. I feel like (no basis in fact!) the price of oil/gasoline is going to have to increase much, much further for ethanol to be a realistic alternative. Just my 2 cents.

This will get modded Flamebait and/or Troll, especially coming from me, but JEEESUS I have already read five comments griping about this technology not solving X problem, causing Y problem, etc. THIS IS BETTER! One guy complains that it won't fix the greenhouse gas problem--it won't make it any worse. Another complains it's gonna use up all our land. Another complains it's gonna poison the environment with pesticides. Look people, will nothing make you guys happy? The main things this tech will do for

Agreed! I hate HFcorn syrup for anything other fluid flow experiments. (:) )I really like what Brazil has done with EtOH. But as a chemical engineer, I'm much more fond of biodiesel. Both for the engine technologies, performance characteristics and overall robustness of infrastructure. It can be transported in any kerosine/diesel/gas truck no sweat. And it keeps engines a lot cleaner than fossil derived fuels.

Ethanol makes sense for brazil, but bio makes more sense in a lot of places. Just think: to make et

IIRC ethanol can be blended into regular fuel up to 15% and be used in cars already on the road in the USA, while an 85% ethanol/15% gasoline (E85) can be used in "flex-fuel" vehicles that can be purchased from most manufacturers on request. It's only a stopgap, because ethanol is currently expensive to produce. This may change with biotech to improve fermentation, as well as a shift in US trade policy to facilitate the import of sugar cane, a much better starting material for fermentation (or just import the ethanol!)

Still, I believe the biggest limitation is, even assuming moderate improvements in conservation and efficiency, there isn't enough land available to produce the corn/beets/sugarcane needed. Plus, the biggest consumers are commercial (i.e., diesel) vehicles -- we might be better off investing in carbon-neutral catalytic solutions like Changing World Technologies [changingworldtech.com] or AlphaKat [alphakat.de], which can use a wide variety of biomass as input and produce diesel fuel.

A look at a small table [eroei.com] of energy return on energy invested figures gives ethanol from corn a 1.3, ethanol from sugarcane something like 0.8 to 1.7 (meaning it could possibly be a net energy loser!), and ethanol from corn residues 0.7 to 1.8. Compare that with petroleum's EROEI, which is today something of the order of 23, and had once been higher than 100. Even at the maximum efficiency level, it would probably take dedicating all of the arable land in the United States to grow corn for conversion to ethanol to allow business as usual. Also, mechanized farming techniques are so heavily dependent on petroleum-based (and natural gas based) fertilizers and pesticides. Here's a good article [fromthewilderness.com] on how to properly evaluate these schemes for alternative energy, and ethanol doesn't fare very well.

No, the only real solution to the energy crisis is to abandon the grossly wasteful American way of life, and take steps towards serious conservation efforts.

But look at the citation for the data on that table: Energy and the U.S. Economy: A Biophysical Perspective Cutler J. Cleveland; Robert Costanza; Charles A. S. Hall; Robert Kaufmann Science, New Series, Vol. 225, No. 4665 (Aug. 31, 1984), 890-897.

Technology has advanced a long way since 1984, particularly in the area of enzymology to break down chemically resistant carbon in plant tissues, like cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Brazil's ethanol program relies heavily on conversion of sugar; to make ethanol economically competitive in the US, we would need to rely on conversion of cross-linked starch and long-chain polymers. The phenolics in lignin would be a feedstock for industrial chemistry. Here's some more general info [energy.gov].

The premise of the post is a fallacy, but everything you wrote is as well.The post is wrong for the same reason people who hype hydrogen as the solutionare wrong. Ethanol and hydrogen are storage mediums, not energy sources. It'strue that ethanol is traditionally dervied from fermentation, but in this casethe energy source is *biomass* not ethanol. It's technically no different thantossing logs into the boiler of a train.

>Well, farming the corn necessary to fuel the US will need far more land than>the

Desertification is a result of poor farming technology. Rich farmers growing ethanol crops would use high levels of technology to reduce the risk of desertification. It is much more of a problem in poor countries where small farms grow subsistence crops.

If it has such a high energy content, what about building a powerplant surrounded by fields of this grass, and just burn it and use a steam turbine to generate electricity? Then use this technique [slashdot.org] to take care of the smoke emissions. If you compare the electrical transmission losses with the amount of energy lost by fermenting it and making alcohol and then transporting that, I wonder which is more efficient?

Why not use kelp (seaweed)? Doesn't that stuff grow around a foot a day? Since this new process can use cellulose, and has a net energy gain, just grow kelp in the middle of the ocean. I can think of a few benefits:- Current agriculture remains unaffected, thereby also unaffecting most food supplies.- Kelp is a weed that grows without any special help: just make sure it gets enough sunlight.- Kelp grows in the ocean where, last time I checked, few people (if any) live. No issues with taking up land.- Maybe

If ethanol is a viable fuel, remove all the subsidies and tax manipulation, and it will stand on its own. So far, it's nothing more than a massive corporate-welfare program for Archer Daniels Midland (price fixer to the world).

Actually, I think it would probably be slightly better than a closed cycle. Chances are that ethanol production from plant biomass will never be 100% efficient, and always leave at least a little waste carbon. As a result, the carbon dioxide released by burning any amount ethanol should add up to less than the plants used to produce it consumed from the atmosphere.

Nothing is going to help reduce global warming unless we use non CO2 energy generation to precipitate CO2 out of the atmosphere. Even if the US and Europe ceased emissions, China and India who are going through a massive industrialization would quickly 'compensate.' If you want results, make a lot of new nuclear plants and a lot CO2 removal devices (perhaps a calcite pool?).

One other option: nuclear winter cancels global warming. It is up to YOU (yes, you!) to decide whether this is a good idea or not.

It also reduces the amount of Sulfur release, reducing acid rain. As acid rain has contributed to the deforestation of Scandinavia quite considerably, a reduction in atmospheric Sulfur may allow these to grow back and over time photosynthesis some of the CO2 back to Oxygen.

Yes, we all know that Pimentel (and whatever recently graduated grad student or two he can grab up) is an anti-ethanol crusader. We also know that he's almost alone in his claims that ethanol is a net energy loser. Lastly, we also know that whenever he says it, news sources gobble it up, because it's "controversy".

It's also wrong.

First off, lets start with the fact that even if a fuel were a net energy loser, it's irrelevant. Ethanol converts a source of energy that you can't put into your gas tank into one that you can. Usually that's natural gas, but sometimes it's agricultural waste or even waste heat from other processes or power plants. The nazis converted coal to oil with horrible efficiency (using far more energy's worth of coal than they got out in gasoline), but it powered their war machine.

Ignoring that, it's not even close to a net energy loser. Everyone's studies except Pimentel comes up with this fact. Why does Pimentel get such different numbers from everyone else? He rigs the game. Instead of assuming, logically, that if ethanol demand increases, people will build more modern plants, he uses the efficiency numbers of plants from the '70s. He uses the world's worst efficiency numbers on fertilizer production. He assumes that all corn that would go toward the ethanol production comes from irrigated land (very little corn is irrigated). Some people defend this last point, saying that the corn would require new land, and any land that it would have to grow on that wouldn't need to be irrigated is already in use. This is incorrect; the corn would take the place of plants that can tolerate drier conditions, which would move into the more arid land. Overall, total irrigation use would increase, but is is incorrect to pretend that it would increase by the amount as if you had to irrigate all of the newly needed corn.

In short, Pimentel cheats to get his bad result. And he is routinely criticized for doing so. Find me an anti-ethanol study that doesn't have his name on it, and I might care.

By the way, part of the reason why ethanol is so expensive has nothing to do with energy balances, or even its production costs: it's transportation. You can't ship ethanol in much of our current oil pipeline infrastructure.

My main complaint about ethanol is simply the land issue. More farmland=More deforestation. Especially in tropical countries, this is a major issue.

Part of the problem is that ethanol was hyped up so much before it was able to deliver.I know that in this region, it has been pumped up as a great way to diversify our agriculture, and a great way to prove that these feed lots are a good thing rather than a bad one.

An agriculture economics student that I am related to sought to prove how great ethanol was for her project class. She studied the many variables surrounding the plant that was to be built near here. Despite the fact that she was biased toward

I agree on all counts but I would add that there are other sources for ethanol than corn and some grow on arid land. One issue that's rarely discussed is that a lot of land is growing government subsidized crops that are essentially unneeded. If the land was used instead for ethanol or oil crops there would be a net gain. So long as the farmers get their subsidies they don't care what they grow. The problem usually comes down to a lack of communication between government departments. Much of the government opperates like warring camps competing for financial resources. If there was more cooperation in the government many of these problems would go away. Alternative sources are taboo because the oil companies are threatened by them. If it was simply a matter of wanting to stay on the oil standard we'd be romancing Canada for oil sand oil but the government has been ignoring the largest known source of oil. Why? Domestic oil companies have no control of that source. By invading Iraq we gained control of one of the largest current sources. It helps keep the domestic oil companies in control of the money. I hate to see the oil sands become the answer because that means a drastic increase in global warming. I hate the term global warming because it's deceptive. It's climate destabilization in truth. Notice the record cold and snow falls in Hawaii that no one in memory can remember seeing? It's part of the same effect and the global warming models predicted it. Everyone shouldn't be afraid of global warming it's the backlash which is global cooling that should make people afraid. Remember during the last round half of the US and virtually all of Canada was under an ice sheet. Europe is scared. Why aren't we? Just how many record hurricanes do we need in a year before some one wakes up and smells the CO2?

The real problem is that the automakers are excluding any solutions that don't require a combustion engine. They've completely backed off of electric cars now and we'll have hydrogen burning combustion engines before we have all electric cars.

Electric cars give us real choices about how we power our vehicles, and how (and for how long) we maintain them.

Ok but you might not like it, Nuclear, fission that is. Really the only (proven) viable option.

Or coal (or tarsands/gas/other burnable shit), we got tons of that, but no help with the global warming. Geothermal could theoreticaly fit the bill but isn't there yet. Solar and wind power have their niches. There's zero point energy, but the NSA will continue too suppres it. Some form of fussion, but not until its too late. Or something else, unforseen by ME, unlikely.

Instead of coming exclusively from corn or sugar cane as it has up to now, thanks to biotech breakthroughs, the fuel can be made out of everything from prairie switchgrass and wood chips to corn husks and other agricultural waste.

You're criticizing ethanol based upon old technology. Cellulosic ethanol doesn't depend upon corn, and is more cost-effective in the bargain.

Supporters of biomass fuels are behind bio-diesel. Corn growers are behind ethanol. There's lots of money to be made making ethanol if the market would exist, and it's the corn growers who would reap the rewards.

Joe HighSchoolQuarterBack working the fry machine at McD's isn't going to be making a fortune in his side business selling used freedom fry oil.

Right. It remains to be seen if the total end-to-end energy balance is positive. Ethanol combustion is not very energetic compared to hydrocarbones, and so you need much more of it to store the same energy as, say, the same volume of gasoline.

Considering that most agricultural ethanol production processes require energy (to harvest and transport raw biomass, to grind it, to heat and break cellulose, to mix, etc), it's easy to see why you should be very careful with your energy balance, otherwise you might

I think an earlier poster had a point. How many acres of grass (i.e. front and back yards, landscaping, parks, playing fields) are already being grown in the US? How many people already water and fertilize and maintain them? How much cut grass is already being gathered weekly and hauled off to dumps?

It would appear that what we should be looking into is a way to divert the biomass we're already growing and harvesting to a different destination.

It also doesn't help ethanol's case that the most efficient crop to produce it is so demonized in the US. Not only does hemp have a higher usable energy content than corn or soybeans, but it freakin' grows as a weed! It ought to win out over corn and soybeans just by the elimination of fertilizer costs alone!

But no-o, we can't have people growing hemp because it's too similar to marijuana, and we'd have to put even more stoners in jail (who shouldn't even have to be there anyway)!

Because the Feds don't have the constitutional right to ban it outright, only to regulate it under the interstate commerce clause. Why do you suppose that it took a constitutional amendment to allow Congress to ban alcohol, and even when they had one, they still permitted medicinal and religious uses? No such amendment was ever passed to allow them to ban all the other substances they have prohibited. The only reason they get away with it is that the judges have been a bunch of spineless pussies ever since

Arguing that the law is unjust is beside the point. The fact remains that growing (selling, using) marijuana is illegal in the United States.Oh, I guess that's why they should be in jail.

The same logic would justify rounding up the Jews and throwing them into concentration camps. The law stated that they needed to be marked, rounded up, and destroyed. Obviously throwing a kid in jail for smoking weed is not the same as incerating jews, but the extreme example serves its point.

The idea is simple. You take any plant matter containing cellulose {a long chain polysaccharide which is fairly immune to yeast}, and hydrolyse the cellulose into mono-, di- and short-chain polysaccharides. Then you have something that will undergo fermentation.

Any dilute acid will hydrolyse cellulose, but then you have the problem to get rid of the acid {which will harm the yeast} without creating a salt which also will harm the yeast. {Might